Why Nations Fail

part of a series of events and changes that finally broke the
mold in the South and led to a fundamental change of
institutions. As we saw in 
chapter 12
, after the Civil War,
southern landowning elites had managed to re-create the
extractive economic and political institutions that had
dominated the South before the Civil War. Though the
details of these institutions changed—for example, slavery
was no longer possible—the negative impact on economic
incentives and prosperity in the South was the same. The
South was notably poorer than the rest of the United States.
Starting in the 1950s, southern institutions would begin to
move the region onto a much faster growth trajectory. The
type of extractive institutions ultimately eliminated in the
U.S. South were different from the colonial institutions of
pre-independence Botswana. The type of critical juncture
that started the process of their downfall was also different
but shared several commonalities. Starting in the 1940s,
those who bore the brunt of the discrimination and the
extractive institutions in the South, people such as Rosa
Parks, started to become much better organized in their
fight against them. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme
Court and the federal government finally began to intervene
systematically to reform the extractive institutions in the
South. Thus a main factor creating a critical juncture for
change in the South was the empowerment of black
Americans there and the end of the unchallenged
domination of the southern elites.
The southern political institutions, both before the Civil
War and after, had a clear economic logic, not too different
from the South African Apartheid regime: to secure cheap
labor for the plantations. But by the 1950s, this logic
became less compelling. For one, significant mass
outmigration of blacks from the South was already under
way, a legacy of both the Great Depression and the
Second World War. In the 1940s and ’50s, this reached an
average of a hundred thousand people per year.
Meanwhile, technological innovation in agriculture, though
adopted only slowly, was reducing the dependence of the
plantation owners on cheap labor. Most labor in the
plantations was used for picking cotton. In 1950 almost all
southern cotton was still picked by hand. But the
mechanization of cotton picking was reducing the demand

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for this type of work. By 1960, in the key states of Alabama,
Louisiana, and Mississippi, almost half of production had
become mechanized. Just as blacks became harder to
trap in the South, they also became no longer
indispensable for the plantation owners. There was thus
less reason for elites to fight vigorously to maintain the old
extractive economic institutions. This did not mean that they
would accept the changes in institutions willingly, however.
Instead, a protracted conflict ensued. An unusual coalition,
between southern blacks and the inclusive federal
institutions of the United States, created a powerful force
away from southern extraction and toward equal political
and civil rights for southern blacks, which would finally
remove the significant barriers to economic growth in the
U.S. South.
The most important impetus for change came from the
civil rights movement. It was the empowerment of blacks in
the South that led the way, as in Montgomery, by
challenging extractive institutions around them, by
demanding their rights, and by protesting and mobilizing in
order to obtain them. But they weren’t alone in this,
because the U.S. South was not a separate country and the
southern elites did not have free rein as did Guatemalan
elites, for example. As part of the United States of America,
the South was subject to the U.S. Constitution and federal
legislation. The cause for fundamental reform in the South
would finally receive support from the U.S. executive,
legislature, and Supreme Court partly because the civil
rights movement was able to have its voice heard outside
the South, thereby mobilizing the federal government.
Federal intervention to change the institutions in the
South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in
1944 that primary elections where only white people could
stand were unconstitutional. As we have seen, blacks had
been politically disenfranchised in the 1890s with the use of
poll taxes and literacy tests (
this page
–
this page
). These
tests were routinely manipulated to discriminate against
black people, while still allowing poor and illiterate whites to
vote. In a famous example from the early 1960s, in
Louisiana a white applicant was judged literate after giving
the answer “FRDUM FOOF SPETGH” to a question about
the state constitution. The Supreme Court decision in 1944

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was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the
political system to blacks, and the Court understood the
importance of loosening white control of political parties.
That decision was followed by